Representative fucktard du jour

Some people care about the most inane shit.

Fear not the fate of the republic.

Mr. Sincerity over-shares

Yeah, I know, it’s old news. I’ve just recently escaped from a time-warp so I’ve missed out on some current events so you’ll just have to bear with me until I can catch up.

Still, time plus distance makes the stench even stronger, don’t you agree?

Yeah like this is going to happen

Pure and utter bollocks

GM says new Volt to get 230 mpg in city driving

The EPA guidelines, developed with input from automakers, figure that cars like the Volt will travel more on straight electricity in the city than on the highway. If a person drives the Volt less than 40 miles, in theory they could go without using gasoline.

[Yahoo AP]

According to this bogus claim, actual fuel used- if your test consists of driving the vehicle for under 40 miles at a sedate pace- is actually none at all (not counting the coal burned to charge the batteries).

Which is infinity, or ∞mpg.

Why not run with that as the lede?

I guess that angle seemed too unrealistic, even too grandiose that the GM spokes-holes didn’t think such a tall tale would fool even idiotic AP beat writers (really?). Little did they know these glorified stenographers just jot down what they hear without question, and it gets published. Now I bet they wish they’d not restrained their inner Gecko.

This is the kind of spin which strains credibility, so typical of glorified beancounters, detached as they are from the real world. Especially true in the case of GM, which, judging from the desperation such gimmickry reveals, is probably not a good bet to survive.

Do they really think the public is that stupid?

…

–
“You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.” -Scott Adams

…

Alabama retards

Not only can’t these tards get the truck in the bin (too small? perhaps they should have thought this through), they apparently feel it’s perfectly fine to trash a perfectly good vehicle because they made a (taxpayer subsidized) sale. Big whoop.

And you and I get to pay for this lunacy.

Of course, Alabama doesn’t have the market for ‘tards cornered, no sirree Bob- we got a an entire nation of them. To paraphrase Howard Dean, they’re in California, and Montana, and New York, and Florida, and Texas… etc.

Could not have happened to a nicer guy

Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan

Think Bandar Bush will eventually receive that particular (Saudi) royal treatment: beheading?

Who knows, but this steaming turd once threatened UK officials that if they did not stop the investigation into the British Aerospace (BAE) slush fund which him and his family/cronies relied upon for frequent travel and million dollar shopping excursions (no lie) then the UK might soon see another 7/7.

In kingdom, Saudi prince’s coup ‘fails’
Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:03:54 GMT

Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the kingdom’s former ambassador to the United States, is reportedly under house arrest over a conspiracy against the monarch.

Saad al-Faqih, head of the opposition group Islamic Reform Movement, told Arab-language TV al-Alam that Prince Bandar has been disappeared and the media has published no word from the ex-diplomat’s whereabouts since nearly three months ago.

According to al-Faqih, the prince first disappeared in Britain but he returned to the kingdom shortly afterwards.

He added that after Saudi officials discovered that he had provoked 200 agents working for the Saudi security service to stage a coup against King Abdullah, he was put under house arrest.

Al-Faqih said people close to the king had disclosed Bandar’s plots and foiled them.

He said Saudi sources believe that intelligence provided by some Arab countries help the Saudi monarch foil Prince Bandar’s conspiracy.

Power struggle between members of the Saudi royal family has been common as power is shared among some 200 princes out of the estimated 7000 family members.

Known as Bandar Bush because of his close relations with former US President George W Bush, the prince is son of Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz.

I am sure it is all one big misunderstanding.

…

–
“It will be many years before the masses discover just how completely they have been fleeced by the power elite.” -Richard Smith

Oh Blighty

The expense scandal in the UK has resulted in a few token resignations:

First, Jaqui Smith:

Most damagingly, she faced the humiliating disclosure that her husband claimed for pay-per-view pornographic films on her Commons expenses.  It has also been revealed that she claimed for items including a barbeque and a butt-plug.

[Telegraph]

OO-er.

Now for the rest:

• Two government ministers also say they’re going
• Two more Labour MPs are to step down
• Private prosecution threat for Chaytor and three others
• Cameron: Election essential to ‘cleanse’ Parliament
• The axe is also still hanging over Chancellor Alistair Darling
  [Daily Mail]

Penny-ante sneak thieves claiming phantom expenses for as little a few pounds. Tsk-tsk.

You know your country is FUCKED when even crooked politicians have no outsize ambition.

Give me Huey Long any day over these pikers.

…

–
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

State proposal could steal borrow millions from cities

Last week, the state’s Department of Finance informed cities of its proposal to steal borrow as much as 8 percent of local governments’ property tax revenues — giving the state an extra $2 billion. The cities could in turn borrow the money from the private sector, the proposal suggests, but city leaders scoff at the notion.

[Mercury News]

The muni’s can borrow (at interest, of course) from the private sector to make up what the state takes? Good luck with that!

We’ve got trouble at every tier of .gov.

We’ve got a president sorely deficient of any depth of knowledge of how business should be conducted (not that he’s much worse than the leechfucks populsting Wall St.). He relies on goons to set policy, and all these leechfucks know how to do is spend.

These ass-klowns  have already committed to MORE THAN ONE-HALF OF THIS NATION’S G.D.P. to turn private banking institutions into what are now essentially GSE’s.

Spending isn’t the answer to our problems, the PPiP-tards just think of this as the easiest way out; not the smartest; not the best; just easy.

What else would you expect but a predictable and pedestrian response from bureacrats-for-life.

And they’ll be long gone from the party before the bill arrives.

And arrive it will.

…

–
When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

‘tards ‘r’ us

Big Daddy Economy

Won’t You Join Me and Raise a Finger to the All-powerful Welfare Class?

Most Americans think we live in a country that is governed by democracy, a country where capitalism has free expression.

The truth about this, which surprises most Americans because it wasn’t what was emphasized (much) in school,  is that we live in a republic, where socialism is practiced most profitably at the highest levels of society (‘old money’ investors, coporate interests), and favoritism (‘crony capitalism’, ‘corporate welfare’, lobbys) in fact reigns.

The recent disasters in banking, equities and politics has exposed cracks which are quickly being patched over. The cracks are still there; however most Americans are too busy (or too frightened) to peer in and see just what those cracks reveal.

Among the many travesties we have witnessed these past two years, one aspect that gets little recognition, but which helps explains much of the motivation of why things got done the way they got done (‘bailout’), is that America has become a manifestation of the “Big Daddy” economy.

Let me explain, using our most recent ex-president as an example.

George W. Bush was by reliable accounts a feckless businesman [1]. If it were not for family connections, he’d be hard pressed to find regular employment (‘day job’). What he personally lacked in intelligence and creativity, he absolutely made up for with lazy, entitled ambition. Apparently the acorn fell pretty far (but not too far!) from the tree.

W’s ’success’ in the business sector would be later spinned by the Reuplikrats during campaigning to ‘prove’ his ’success’ and ‘free market’ bona fides. In fact, W was the living embodiment of the Peter Principle, succeeding upwards with each failure. In that way he resembled his most avid supporters.

Running companies into the ground, only to be bailed out by his daddy’s cronies, became his modus operandi true calling, as we came to see (“when the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.” [Wiki]). W and many of his cronies contemporaries (Steve Forbes, Bill Simon, 1,000 others) would inevitably fail in life at achieving personal success outside the shadow of their fathers; but they would succeed in carrying this undercurrent, this message of tough-talking incompetence with a safety-net (see the double meaning of “too big to fail” [2]), into this nation’s very psyche, informing and interfering with it’s economic operation, materializing into the now-familiar bailout mentality… similar in many ways in which mail carriers go postal.

Preferred ‘clients’  (cronies, ‘fortunate sons’) are bailed out, rather than allowed to be free to fail (the banking lobby’s recent success at mythologizing ’systemic risk’). As if failure is bad thing, rather than simply a part of the overall capitalist experience.

Ordinary people, untethered to the rightful welfare class, who have succeeded in life and business, are not being politely asked by the crony class for a ‘hand-up’- they are not even being told to pony up. They are being imperceptibly pick-pocketed by the tag-team of Treasury and Federal Reserve, Inc., the latter which has the power to inflate currency. Thus, lowering the value of your dollar; thus, stealing from you and your future earnings, in order to buy ginormous amounts of spackle for the banking community today (RUSH JOB!).

Everywhere you look, from Benron Bukkake, to Hanky (Panky) Paulson, to Elmer ‘Dicky the goldfish’ Fuld to <insert your fave crony capitalist here>, there are connected (or ‘made’ boys men) acting like surrogate daddies to their ideological offspring (I got yer ‘neo liberal bias’ right her Faux Nooz). Yes, they have succeeded in ways their fathers never imagined; instead of stewarding a system where hard work and fresh ideas are rewarded in the marketplace, and commercial growth is stimulated in organic ways, they’ve rigged the game so they can reap the benefits of your success, make your success theirs too, in ways feudal lords could only have dreamed.

All-in-all an immense improvement over the divine right of kings, who in olden times would rape your daughter and bugger your son. Today, they only want their/your money!

Isn’t crony capitalism a wonderful thing? What’s that you say, you aren’t a crony?

Sucks to be you!

…

1. Arbusto Energy (sometimes referred to as Arbusto Oil) was a petroleum and energy company formed in Midland, Texas, in 1977, by former US President George W. Bush and a group of investors which included Salem bin Laden of the Saudi Binladin Group. This fact became controversial after the September 11, 2001 attacks due to Salem bin Laden being an older, half-brother of Osama bin Laden, who planned and financed the attacks. Payback is a bitch!

2. The Too Big to Fail policy is the idea that in economic regulation the largest and most interconnected businesses are “too big to [let] fail.” This means that it might encourage recklessness since the government would pick up the pieces in the event it was about to go out of business. The phrase has also been more broadly applied to refer to a government’s policy to bail out any corporation. It raises the issue of moral hazard in business operations. Often incorrectly interpreted by Joe Six Pack to mean fail was not possible, the phrase’s true nuance has become the wish that came true, and is now an eyesore to this intrepid blogger as each time I am reminded of who is really footing the bill.

…

–
Consume less and enjoy a better quality of life.

Organized crime

Sen. Feinstein’s Husband Cashes In on Crisis

California senator sought $25 billion for a government agency that had awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties.

On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms, the Washington Times reported on Tuesday.

Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments – not direct federal dollars.

Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) – the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman – had won the competitive bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited from failed banks.

About the same time of the contract award, Mr. Blum’s private investment firm reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it and related affiliates had purchased more than 10 million new shares in CBRE. The shares were purchased for the going price of $3.77; CBRE’s stock closed Monday at $5.14.

Spokesmen for the FDIC, Mrs. Feinstein and Mr. Blum’s firm told The Times that there was no connection between the legislation and the contract signed Nov. 13, and that the couple didn’t even know about CBRE’s business with FDIC until after it was awarded.

Senate ethics rules state that members must avoid conflicts of interest as well as “even the appearance of a conflict of interest.” Some ethics analysts question whether Mrs. Feinstein ran afoul of the latter provision, creating the appearance that she was rewarding the agency that had just hired her husband’s firm.

.0000025 Success Rate

Last summer, Congress passed the Hope for Homeowners Act, setting aside $300 billion to help people refinance into more affordable mortgages. But the program has been a total flop.

When it was first introduced, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the program could help 400,000 people keep their homes.

But more than six months after the program was launched, the Federal Housing Administration says only one homeowner has made it all the way through the government program and received the FHA guarantee.

Hope for Homeowners was sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)…

I suppose that is all one needs to know.  [NPR]

Sing-along: #you’re out of touch#

…

–
“It could be worse… they could be batting a negative average!”

We the People to Wall St.: Drop Dead

Special guest diatribe courtesy of Something Awful:

The following is a fucking letter sent right fucking now to the New York Goddamn Times, another dying newspaper that is spending its final years ignominiously lurching between the rotten crotch of Wall Street and the ghastly juice pit of its political patrons. The Fourth Fucking Estate lives on the Internet now, you simpering whores and charlatans!This is a response to an actual publicity stunt of a letter puked out by the biggest dickbag in recent history, Jake DeSantis, and then published by America’s paper of dumb fucking record. This ass polyp DeSantis worked for the patient zero of the ebola currently running rampant through the rupturing vessels and blown veins of our country’s financial circulatory system. This is a dude who helped us move a couple clicks closer to some Road Warrior 12 Monkeys shit and now he’s crying because he didn’t get his prostate massaged thoroughly enough by the taxpayers. When I address this shit to Wall Street, I mean specifically Jake DeSantis, formerly of A.I.G., but also all of the rest of these dumbfucks who just don’t fucking get it.

DEAR Wall Street,

What a bunch of whiny fucking babies. John Galt would be puking blood for 200-pages over this load of shit, you bunch of sobbing welfare queens. You fucked up. You ruined everything. You broke it, and we fucking bought it, because big baby was too big baby to fail.

We get it all ways from you motherfuckers. You’re robbing us of our present and future now, but first you stepped on our throats on your way to the top. You raked in the money with a bunch of made up fantasyland bullshit that wouldn’t fool a counting horse on America’s Funniest Home Videos, but somehow suckered in every major bank in the world.

Credit default swaps.

Those things are so fucking dumb that when you explain them to somebody and they laugh about how dumb they are you’ve got to act like ooooh they’re so magical and complicated. Far too complex for the plebes to get. No! Wrong! Go into OTB and put fifty dollars on Rambo’s Beautiful Blood. You just bought a credit default swap. Whoaaa you’re blowing my simple pea brain with your fancy Wall Street talkin’. You sadsack fuckers.

So everybody bought into your big scheme, even when they didn’t know they were playing, and now the whole thing has come crashing down because too many people won the fucking unbelievably obvious bet that a million illegal immigrants were going to default on million dollar home loans. Suddenly all your stupid fake money is gone, but if it’s gone the whole system of bullshit lies collapses and you look like dickheads. So whoopty-doo, now we gotta make the fake money turn real or else the house of shitty cunt cards comes crashing down, only there isn’t enough real money to cover all the fake money, so we’re making more real money.

Then there’s A.I.G., the bad seed, the carbuncle on our anus, the weeping wound in our tit, the sorry source of all our misery and woe. This is the monster garage full of miscreants that dreamed up the fire-breathing nitro-gulping predicament we’re in right fucking now. Their financial products division created the derivatives market from lies and their executives raked in billions in bonuses and easy money. While they were peddling bad bets, median wages in the US stagnated and poor working schmucks leaned increasingly on credit to get by. Prices on everything were going up, but credit was easy to come by what with all that bullshit money to throw around.

The top 10 recipients of cash contributions from AIG in 2008

1. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., $103,100
2. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., $101,332
3. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., $59,499
4. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., $35,965
5. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., $24,750
6. Former Gov. Mitt Romney, (R) Pres $20,850
7. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., $19,975
8. Rep. John Larson, D-Conn, $19,750
9. Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., $18,500
10. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R) Pres $13,200

So you can pretty much be assured that each and every name above is dirty. You can also be certain each and every one is all for bailing out the rich at the expense of everyone else.

Unfrickingbelievable

Are these people on the level? What possbile motive could they have for revealing that they squandered an absolute fortune and have fuck-all left to show for it?

They should be public laughing stock, but the report doesn’t dare tread too deeply or risk alientating a million other fuckups (“aka our viewers”) out there in teevee land.

They offer no platitudes, or even explanations.  The report probes superficially, letting them off the hook by portraying them simply as Victims of circumstance. Nobody could have seen it coming. Like AIG they’re just victims of the economic downturn.

Their downfall has nothing at all to do with their poor judgment, apparent ridicule of thrift, lack of patience for prudence; preferring to spend spend spend like crazed loons, and living like megalomaniacs is what they’re all about.

No mea culpas. No ‘I fucked up.’ Not even one American dollar saved for a rainy day.

Shed a tear for their kids, who could have the best in life but instead will probably have to attend (sniff sniff) public school.

Bitch done set us up

But now, the government’s plan to “save” the economy is to “save the banks,” along similar lines to the West trying to save its banks from their adventure in the post-Soviet economies. This is the basic neoliberal economic plan, after all. The U.S. economy is about to be “post-Sovietized.” The U.S. giveaway to banks, masquerading as “help for troubled homeowners”

The Obama bank bailout is arranged much like an IMF loan to support the exchange rate of foreign currency, but with the Treasury supporting financial asset prices for U.S. banks and other financial institutions. Instead of banks and oligarchs abandoning the dollar, the aim is to enable them to dump their bad mortgages and CDOs and get domestic Treasury bonds. Private-sector debt will be moved onto the U.S. Government balance sheet, where “taxpayers” will bear losses – mainly labor not Wall Street, inasmuch as the financial sector has been freed of income-tax liability by the “small print” in last fall’s Paulson-Bush bailout package.

The Treasury will take on the bad debt that banks are stuck with, and will permit mortgagees to renegotiate their monthly payment down to 38 per cent of their income. But rather than the banks taking the loss as they should do for over-lending, the Treasury itself will make up the difference – and pay it to the banks so that they will be able to get what they hoped to get. The hapless mortgage-burdened family stuck in their negative-equity home turns out to be merely a passive vehicle for the Treasury to pass debt relief on to the commercial banks.

In the mean time, bad private-sector debt will be shifted onto the government’s balance sheet. Interest and amortization currently owed to the banks will be replaced by obligations to the U.S. Treasury. Taxes will be levied to make up the bad debts with which the government is stuck. The “real” economy will pay Wall Street – and will be paying for decades!

Calling the $12 trillion giveaway to bankers a “subprime crisis” makes it appear that bleeding-heart liberals got Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into trouble by insisting that these public-private institutions make irresponsible loans to the poor. The party line is, “Blame the victim.” But we know this is false. The bulk of bad loans are concentrated in the largest banks. It was Countrywide and other banksters that led the irresponsible lending and brought heavy-handed pressure on Fannie Mae. Most of the nation’s smaller, local banks didn’t make such reckless loans. The big mortgage shops didn’t care about loan quality, because they were run by salesmen. The Treasury is paying off the gamblers and billionaires by supporting the value of bank loans, investments and derivative gambles, leaving the Treasury in debt.”

-Prof. Michael Hudson

Faux News “anchor” Sits on Chrysler Bldg., Likes It

It’s a lock

Death on two legs

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Giver her a break

I read this woman’s depiction of her plight. In the end, she’s just another person with a sense of entitlement. She’s obfuscating her bad decision-making by cloaking her true desire/motive/agenda: she wants her bailout (handout) too.

In her update, she’s says she’s not… but c’mon! Gimme gimme gimme. Me me me me. She has a victim mentality, but that just rings hollow. At 65 years of age, she should act like a grown up. Instead she still has the inclination to rely on her daddy.

Her attitude is representative of the pigman’s disease. She wants to socialize her losses, too. If Big Daddy is bailing out them big bad banks, “why not meeeee too?”, she asks. She could try holding her breath until she turns blue? Heh. She should try living within her means (that means being able to “afford” a 30-year fixed not a 5-year I.O. with HELOC at bubble peak- c’mon!)

Life is not without risk. She gambled and lost. She over-financed in order to overpay for her home. Deal with it. Getting out of her mortgage by reneging on her contractual obligation (mortgage), while repugnant to the prudent-minded, is still (always) an option. Unfortunatley for her, this door will only open when she defaults. That will happen when she comes to finally accept the contingent penalties (fico score, etc.) as reasonable.

The other side of the coin to her story  is, someone else will buy her home, at closer to its true value.

What is it’s true value?

The market establishes that.

We’re a long long way from there.

Many of the commenters see right through her.

…

–
“Why is our government penalizing the people who played by the rules and rewarding the people who didn’t?”

Numbers make her brain hurt

Erin Burnett is a clueless cunt